Avatar: The Starlight Chronicle
by Cybertoaster
Summary: It has been 3 centuries since the sudden disappearance of Avatar Korra put an end to the Era of the Avatar, and the people of the United Republic have expanded their reach to the stars, thanks to the discovery of gravity bending. Unrest is rising in the outer colonies when a physicist makes a discovery that jumps the track of fate, and could alter the course of history forever.
1. Experiment Day

_I knew you were leaving. I know that you didn't want to tell me, but I also know you kept it from me as an act of kindness. I could tell in those last few weeks by the way you squeezed my hand extra tight, or the way you stayed up later than usual talking with me. I've known you my whole life, Korra. You didn't think I'd notice? It hurt, but I knew you had your reasons._

 _On that night you sat atop your favorite hill in meditation, and you turned to look at me as I approached._

 _You were crying. I hadn't seen you cry in decades. You lifted off the ground and floated with bits of debris. Your lips formed the words "I'm sorry," and in a loud clap of thunder and flash of brilliant light…_

 _You vanished._

 _-Asami Sato, Age 74, The Avatar Journal_

Aya flicked her finger on the touch-screen, revealing the passage on the previous page as she brushed her teeth. She had read this passage several hundred times, but it was still her favorite. It gave her goosebumps, the way it trailed off like that. It seemed to be the beginning of a story, not the conclusion.

She sighed. Here she was, in a very rare stretch of leisure time, reading old passages she could quote from memory. She couldn't help it. Aya Sol was an Avatar junkie. She'd read nearly everything she could find on the subject, especially on _The Vanish_ in particular. The disappearance of Avatar Korra was possibly the greatest mystery in the history of the United Republic. It consumed historians and spiritual leaders for decades before fading into the obscurity of academia and enthusiasts. Aya was no professional historian, but she spent nearly all her slivers of free time studying the Era of the Avatar.

Aya stretched her arms, causing her body to begin a slow vertical roll through the air. She heard the high chirp of her door signal, and said "Come in!"

The door hissed open, revealing a man in a warmly colored orange and yellow jump-suit. A badge on his right breast pocket bore the blue arrow insignia of the life-support control crew. He seemed to hang by his feet from the ceiling from Aya's perspective, and she pushed off the countertop to fix her orientation.

"You reading that old journal again?" he asked. "Has it changed since the last time you read it?"

She switch off the tablet. "Hey Tashi, shouldn't you be venting the waste-tank gas into Hull Maintenance again?"

Tashi waved his hands. "Save the ball-busting, twinkle-toes. I'm here to watch you rip the universe apart." He made a wild grin and airbent a small explosion of wind from his palms.

"Very funny," she chided, but the hairs on the back of her neck bristled. _Experiment day_. The words echoed in her head, tightening her nerves like a vice. She extended her leg, did a quick pump action with her fists, and she fell towards the floor, catching her balance halfway into her fall and rocking up onto the tips of her toes before wobbling into a resting pose.

Tashi laughed. " _Stuck it!_ You know I get here early just to see you do that, right?"

"Shut up," Aya retorted. She blushed, shrugged it off, and tied her hair into a ponytail. "I swim through Oh-G _like a fish_ ," She flaunted. "It's not my fault the earth fleet has this weird fetish with _walking around on the floor…_ "

That got another warm laugh from Tashi. She took a glance in the mirror, and they were off on their walk to the lab.

"Aren't you the least-bit curious what happened?" She prodded as they passed by various other personnel.

"You mean _The Vanish?_ I think what happened, happened. dissecting every single detail of what is in the past is spending too much time looking in the wrong direction."

"Oh, come _onnn_ ," She chided. "Don't start your predestined Air-Temple philosophy soap-box. I know you want to know. How can you _not?_ It's just so…. so…. _Juicey!_ " She continued to gush about the various details of _The Vanish_ as they climbed into a shuttlepod. The door slid shut and it began the trip up to deck 3.

Tashi smirked and leaned against the wall. "So, are you nervous?"

Aya barely waited for him to finish the question. "I'm _freaking out!_ " She exclaimed. "I mean, if my math is right, then this thing is going to change _everything…_ " she trailed off as she let the weight of the sentence sink in. "I mean, d'you know how many gravity benders and physicists have tried and failed at this? There have been _hundreds._ " She ran her fingers through her hair and sighed. "Where the hell do I get off thinking I'll be any different?"

Tashi turned to face her. "Your experiment will work." His eyes sparkled. "You have this face you make when you've solved a problem." He assumed a thinking position, then his eyes bugged out and his jaw dropped open. Aya laughed and elbowed him in the ribcage, but he continued. "Not once have I ever seen you make that face and been wrong. It's like…" he smiled as he settled on the words, "in that moment the solution completes you." He closed his eyes. "A moment of pure joy. I was there when you solved this problem. _Trust_ me, your expression was a dead giveaway. The math checks out."

She looked down at her feet and elbowed him again. "Stop being nice to me, you're making me nervous."

They exited the tube and made their way towards lab 7. She beamed in anticipation as they approached the observation deck. Her heart started pounding. This was her favorite part of her walk to the lab. As she entered from the aft-side door, The ceiling arched upward until it was high above her, and the wall to her right fell away and was replaced with a stunning, floor to ceiling view of the Gyatso Nebula, as well as the singularity named Beifong.

 _I'm not going to stop this time, I'm not going to stop this time._ Aya repeated it in her head as she turned to take in the sight. She slowed, caught her breath, and once again, despite her resolve, felt her knees go weak. The _S.S. SkyBison_ had been here for two weeks taking readings and testing stability, but she could stare into that window for years, and she would still be overcome by its sheer, daunting scale. The bright neon nebula scattered translucent shredded cloths of lime green light across the expanse of the void, its surface speckled with stars of varying colors. In the middle of it all, in daunting proximate relief, sat Beifong. The accretion disk shimmered as it slowly swirled towards the event-horizon. Like light, energy, and everything with mass, Aya's gaze was being pulled ever into that single point in space. The way it warped the stars behind it broke her instinctive understanding of the universe, and she felt like if she stared too long into its incomprehensible depths, she'd get lost in it, and all that she was would pour out through her eyes.

Aya was about to will her legs forward, when a distant streak of light shot into view. She'd seen it so many times before, that she not only knew what it was, she had also internalized its implications. It was a jump trail. Her adrenaline spiked as she frantically searched her memory for a rendezvous memo or supply delivery, but nothing came. That trail could only be from one source.

 _The Spirit Crusade._

She stared, immobilized as the lighting dipped to red and the klaxons sounded. The seconds ticked by for centuries as she watched the geometric speck that would ruin her life's work draw closer. The alarm sounded in her ears. The captain's voice barked over the comms. "All crew to combat stations, this is a situation black! Metal-heads to the deflection system, pilots to docking bays A and C, and sparkies to the Plasma Array!"

 _Why today…_ She wasn't scared. Aya didn't fear death, she was a child of the black. In space, a fear of death just becomes a hassle. No, she was frustrated. She was 20 minutes from the first trial…

She pounded her fists on the glass. She would die, _here_ , within arms reach of the answer. She noticed a glinted line of light flicker for a second, and then she was rocked off her feet.

She slammed into the wall and winced as distant rumbling and explosions tore through the lower decks. She knew what that was. It was a rail gun, and it was a _big one._ She heard a loud _tink_ , followed by scores of others as small explosive rods buried themselves into the hull. One such rod was now embedded in the window, and it stared her in the face. A loud hissing ripped through the room as the air escaped through the fissures in the wound, and the blast clamps on either exit locked down in response to the breach.

The blinking light on the rod grew faster and then finally clicked on. She felt a force slam into her as Tashi pushed her aside. The rod detonated, and everything went black.

As the ringing in her ears slowly faded, Aya opened her eyes and pain tore through her temples. She grimaced as her blurry vision began to focus. Tashi lie in a crumpled heap against the wall. Everything snapped back into place.

There was a giant, impossible, meter-wide jagged hole through the window. Aya stared into the abyss, unbounded by any sort of tangible barrier. The raw, naked edge of the vacuum in front of her filled her with dread. Looking back at Tashi, she noticed his hands shaking. Tashi was desperately bending the atmosphere back into the chamber. It swirled all around them and leaked from the gash in the window.

Aya tore off for the emergency station. She ran to a panel on the back wall of the Obs deck and hit a few buttons, then pressed her hand on the screen. A smooth, diamond shaped object popped out of a compartment. Its underside had a rounded curve, and a large, gangly needle. She grabbed it and swished her arms back. She created a subtle gravity well that launched her towards Tashi, and she skidded to a halt at his side. He was badly burned and bleeding heavily. He turned to her and looked up with his still-functioning eye.

"Heh, _stuck it_ , twinkle-toes," he said through staggered breaths.

"Hold still and _Stop talking!_ " Aya yelled at him. She steadied her hands, took a deep breath, and jabbed the object into Tashi's thigh. It started to glow and Tashi immediately gasped in relief. The rushing torrent of air grew still, and the bubble settled into a uniform shape.

"You know how I feel about these things, right?"

" _GIVE IT A REST!_ I'm not going to sit here and watch you kill yourself so you can have a showdown with _space!_ " She drew in a shuttering breath and the first of her tears smattered onto his jumpsuit. "Aya... listen, there isn't much time…" He reached into his pocket. "I- need you to take this."

He opened his fingers to reveal a little beaded necklace with a stone-carved pendant attached to it. The color had long since faded, and the surface was smooth with generations of touch, but the pendant was unmistakable.

It was a Skybison.

"I-I-I d-don't understand…" Aya stammered through her tears. She reached out to touch it and Tashi grabbed her hand and held it in both of his. "You have to run that experiment, Aya. You know what to do with this…" He struggled, each breath was harder and more jagged than the last. "Your experiment will work… it is… _written…_ "

"Tashi! Don't let the spirits take you, _stay with me!_ " She watched as the Metalbenders and Firebenders of damage control shot a metal patch out towards the window. A thin stream of plasma met with it and it shot onto the hull, sealing the breach in the observation deck. The second the seal was made, Tashi's taught muscles loosened, and he was gone.

Air flooded in through the vents, and Aya squeezed his fingers as her tears mixed with the blood on his wrist. The lights flickered on and the blast clamps hissed open. She looked at the Spirit Crusade ship. She stared it down, seething. She beckoned for it. She hated it. Then it started to grow more distant. She furrowed her brow. _Why would they be backing off?_

She wiped her tears with her wrist and got to her feet. There was no time for the luxury of mourning the dead. She had to do something. That railgun shot looked and felt like it was near engineering. She'd head there. They needed to get out of there as soon as possible, and she knew they'd need gravity benders for the Cosmic Jump. She sprinted down the hall and scrambled into a mobility pod. "E-engineering," she said. Now that she was still, her legs started to shake. She felt her forehead, and her palm entered her vision smeared with her own blood. Looking down over her uniform, she realized she was covered in Tashi's. The necklace was also smeared with crimson, and she rolled it around in her hand.

Suddenly the pod lurched to a stop and Aya braced against the wall with her legs. The screen flickered on to reveal the Chief Engineer, a Gravity Bender named Vars. "Aya, don't come down here!" She shouted over the comms.

"But I'm good with the drive! You need all the help you can get!"

Vars sighed and closed her eyes for a second longer than a standard blink. "The Jump Drive is fatally destabilized. That first rail-volley pierced her straight through. We've got minutes before the fucker overloads. We're ejecting it, but when it detonates, the EM pulse is still going to knock out all of our systems."

Aya froze. _That's why they backed off…_ "You still need me. If I can activate the-"

"Aya! We're screwed down here, and you have eight minutes of power left. Get your ass over to Lab 7 and run your experiment! The UR spent a fortune getting us out here to Beifong, now _make it worth something!"_

Aya opened her mouth to speak, but the screen faded to black. She pounded her fists against the wall and screamed. That thing about fear of death being impractical holds a little less weight when death is staring you in the face. Even still, Vars was right. Not knowing would be a fate worse than death. The doors slid open as she arrived at the deck she left from, and she peeled off down the hall. Now she had a task. It was all that mattered, and it conveniently distracted her from her inevitable end.

She clapped her hands and made a swirling motion, launching her body into a horizontal position, and the hallway became a shaft that she fell through. She looked down to see an explosion tear through the path ahead. She put out her arms to try and slow her momentum, but she was going too fast.

She felt a hard tug on her wrist and her shoulder made a horrible popping noise. She fell to the floor and cried out as the hallway shifted back to being a hallway.

"Are you out of your _mind!?_ " She heard a nasally voice bark at her. She staggered to her feet and her eyes met a gangly man with wild hair and a red engineering uniform. "Hall-diving in a _damaged ship?_ Are you trying to die _faster?"_

"Teelo!, I don't have time for this," she grunted frantically as she tried to move her right arm. "Come with me, I need a sparky to monitor the CPU's heatsink!" She lurched forward as her world slowly stopped spinning, then immediately took off running again. The hull rumbled as more explosions tore through the lower decks.

Teelo stared in shock, then took off after her. " _CPU? What CPU!?_ "

Aya didn't look back. "The one in Lab 7."

Teelo stopped. He steadied his stance and thrust a hand onto the wall, causing sparks to shower out of the nearby control panel. The blast clamp thrust over the hall in front of Aya, and she threw out her arm to catch herself before colliding with it.

"What the hell is wrong with you?" He spouted angrily. "The electrical team is threading power through all sorts of emergency rescue systems and you want to throw the switch on the Temporal Translation experiment? Has it crossed your mind that _energy_ on a damaged starship is a finite resource?"

Aya furrowed her brows. "Teelo, there isn't time. I need you to-"

" _Out of the question Aya!_ " He shouted as he approached her "People will die!"

She shoved him against the wall and screamed in his face. " _They're ALREADY DEAD!_ " Her breathing slowed and she loosened her grip on his shoulders. "That railgun torched the Jump Drive. Overload is inevitable..."

The look on Teelo's face embarked on a journey from anger, to shock, then fear before finally arriving at understanding. He nodded. "This way, we'll stick to the inner hallways."

They ran, dodging past other crewmembers, all scrambling desperately from point A to point B.

Teelo spoke up as they entered the final hallway. "Tashi said he was coming with you, where is he?"

She gave him a solemn look, her cheeks still flushed from crying. He nodded and lowered his head for a moment.

They arrived at the door and entered. Lab 7 wasn't like the rest of the science department. It was a vast, partially spherical room that was custom built into the SkyBison's inner-structure for the sole purpose of running the Temporal Translation experiment. The cavernous space had a flat, circular floor with a box to one side and a pad on the other. In the center, resting in an inlet, was a large, smooth sphere. Geometric panel grooves ran across its surface, and at its base it was connected to a bed of wires it now rested on. Aya ran to the box, and Teelo ran to the control center on the far side. He started to flip switches and touch various control screens with his fingers.

"Looks like we're running at seventy percent power, you've got 40 seconds 'til the Jump Drive pops off, _move!_ "

She tossed a large switch and the box hissed as it broke the vacuum seal and opened. Aya froze. The test object was gone. Aya looked around, but it was nowhere. The tech that was running the pre-translation analysis must've gotten caught up in damage control. The experiment needed an object in the box. Without anything to translate, the experiment wouldn't be possible.

Teelo flipped a switch, and a hatch in the floor opened. Out of it rose a set of mechanical arms. The seams that ran along the wrists and up to the armpits glowed for a second, and then the apparatus popped open. "The bending Aug system is up and running Aya! It _has to be now!"_

She reached in her pocket and felt the smooth stone surface of Tashi's necklace. His words rang out in her head. _You know what to do with this._ She clenched her fist around the necklace, pulled it from her pocket, and placed it into the chamber. She threw the switch back and the box locked down and hissed again.

"Aya, that didn't look like the-"

" _Shut up and watch that heatsink, Teelo!_ We can't have the CPU blowing a fuse while it crunches the numbers!" She ran over to the set of arms and backed into them. They automatically clamped over her arms and hands, and the seams glowed and pulsated with activity. The energy swell was furious, and she fought to keep her composure.

"Drive meltdown in twelve seconds!"

She flexed her fingers and took the appropriate stance. She raised her arm, and the orb in the center of the room rose, its bed of wires uncoiling into tendrils as it slowed to a stop at the center of the space. Lightning began to arc violently from the sphere to the walls and the floor. She balled her fist and the lightning focused onto the box and the platform. _Here goes nothing,_ she thought. With another deep breath, she pumped her arm down, and the sphere filled the room with blinding white light. A shock-wave of force knocked Aya and Teelo against the wall. The comforting hum of the _Skybison's_ reactor faded and died, and the chamber of Lab 7, as well as the rest of the ship, was overtaken by darkness. Before the light faded completely, Aya turned to look at the platform, and what she saw made no sense at all.

Standing on the platform of the Temporal Translation experiment, was the silhouette of a women.


	2. The Impossible Women

Aya's day was off to a truly miserable start. In the span of twenty minutes the universe had chewed her up, swished her around and spat her out again. She was adrift on a dead vessel, with nothing to look forward to but the various ways in which her life could end. Maybe a boarding party, she thought. It would be better than freezing to death after all. Maybe she would get fractally bisected as she fell into Beifong. That was her single most frequent nightmare, so it seemed only fitting. Somewhere in the list, between asphyxiation and having her fluids squeezed out by the vacuum, Aya saw a flicker of light appear. As her eyes focused, so did her immediate memory. She sat up, and pain tore through her head like a driving piston. She fought through it and looked towards the pad.

Standing on it was a sagely women in ragged gear, holding a small ball of flame above her open palm. Aya opened her mouth to speak, but no words came out. She was dumbfounded. In all her thousands of predictions (and she had written _thousands_ ) she had no precedent for a human being appearing on that pad. It floored her, and flooded her mind with questions.

The mysterious women began murmuring to herself. "Aaaah," she said quietly, "That makes sense. Not what I was expecting, but it makes sense…" She waved the flame along her vision as she panned around the room. She turned until she was facing Aya, and stopped. "You!" she exclaimed, and started towards her. She stumbled weakly, her legs shaking, and slowly made her way over. "Sorry about that," she said. "Swimming in the river of time can make walking seem so… so…" She stopped and pondered on the right word. " _linear,"_ She decided. "It seems hard to talk about with words. Language has a lot of pedantic nonsense like… _tenses._ You must be Aya!"

Hearing her own name was like getting splashed in the face with ice-water. "Wha- yes! H-how do you know who I am?" She said meekly. Aya wasn't sure if she could take even one more surprise. It was an unlucky state of mind for the present situation.

The women gave a warm smile and knelt down, examining Aya's injuries. "I've been looking forward to meeting you for a very long time. Well, I guess you could say a very long time, capped with a brief period of infinity…" She gracefully moved her arms, and a spout of water snaked out of a flask at her hip, and began to glow as it gathered at a gash on Aya's leg.

Aya wasn't simple. She had been putting the pieces together ever since this impossible women threw a wrench into her perception of reality, they were just pieces to a puzzle she dare not solve. The implications of this puzzle were deep, complicated, and nearly unfathomable. She opened her mouth, and paused as the words became caught in her throat. She felt like she didn't need to ask the question, but at the same time, prayed for literally any answer that differed from the one she had deduced. "Who are you?" she asked.

The women looked at Aya, her face creased with the tell tale signs of old age, and gave her a look that was somewhere between a grin and a smirk. "You've been searching for the answer to that question your entire life, Aya Sol."

Aya's eyes glazed over, and her jaw moved up and down as she began processing it. Her face was a tangled knot of conflicting emotions. After a few seconds it settled on horror, and she backed away towards the wall. "I- did this… it was _me…_ " she began, each word punctuated by the beginnings of a sob. She stared at her own hands in shock. "The _Vanish_ , the end of the Avatar… It's _my fault…"_ tears brimmed in her eyes and she balled her fists.

Korra burst out laughing. She put out a hand and waved it furiously. "Oh, no no no! this little thing?" She began, motioning to the pad behind her. "There's no way. Your little gadget isn't _that_ good."

Now Aya was even more confused. She stared at the Avatar, dumbfounded. "Then, how… what…" She trailed off, her words fighting for traction in the torrent of her thoughts.

Korra pointed. "That face. You have _no_ idea how long I've been waiting for _that face!_ Though I guess neither do I…" She shifted position, and the glowing water flowed up to Aya's forehead. "Your machine didn't rip me out of my place in time, it was just a convenient exit point." she plowed past the statement like it made all the sense in the world, and glanced around the room. "We're on like, some sort of airship, but _bigger_ right?"

At some point after the tidal waves of confusion were done crashing in the surf, Aya would muse over the description of the _Skybison_ as "an airship, but bigger." For now, there were more pressing matters. "hold on, _hold on,"_ said Aya. She put her arms out as she felt the room begin to spin around her. "How do you know my _name?_ "

The Avatar paused, and thought about it for a second. "You know? A wise monk once told me that premonition isn't some mystical thing. It's just memory in the wrong direction." She paused, and looked down at her knees. "I was amused by his words. But then I started getting memories of this place, an adventure like none I could imagine, and of _you.._." She glanced into Aya's eyes, and it sent shivers up through her spine and into her shoulders. Korra made a face. "Where's that geeky firebender? _Teelo_ , I think?"

Teelo's head popped up from behind the control panel. He stared at her with big, round eyes. "Is it… really…"

The Avatar roller her eyes, and stood up. "Alright, let's get this over with." She raised her hands. "It is I, the _great and mighty_ Avatar Korra! Now let's, you know, _move on?"_ She made a cycling motion with her hands.

Aya had been thinking. "Wait, so does that mean we _live?"_ Teelo joined Aya in looking to Korra for an answer.

Korra knelt down again and gently touched Aya's hand. "This is the hard part, guys," She said, glancing at Teeo before returning her gaze to Aya. "If we simplify it to three dimensions, time is like a river." She made the water from the canteen into a flowing line. "It forks into many winding paths". The water stream split and split until it resembled large tree. "All of those paths exist. They are all real, they all really happened, will happen, and are happening." She paused and sighed. "You know, tenses really _are_ tedious… anyway," She moved her other hand and all but one of the branches fell away, spilling into a puddle on the floor. "I have a few memories from only one of these paths. If at any point we diverge, I'm totally in the dark. It also means I can only tell you what I remember telling you. Giving you information you shouldn't have is…"

Aya sighed, realizing they weren't going to get an answer to the question. "The fastest way to jump the track…" she finished.

"Exactly…" Korra somberly concluded.

There was a long pause. and a silence thickened the air. It seemed almost viscous with implications and unanswered questions. Korra held up her hand, paused for a second, and snapped her fingers as the dull glow of the emergency light-strips flickered on, illuminating the group from the ground. "huh, that was more amusing than I remembered." She got up, dusted herself off, and finished her thought. "Anyway, that means I can't tell you who potentially lives or dies, or what the outcome is, but either way, we need to get off this boat."

"Good luck with _that"_ spouted Teelo. "All of our scouts were getting ready for dust-off, they all got fried by the EMP." He walked over and sat down with them as he talked. "It would take the best electrician an hour to get one up and running by hand, and the _Spirit Crusade_ will have boarding parties over here in ten minutes."

Korra cocked her head slightly. " _Spirit Crusade?"_

They both looked at her with confusion. She nodded. "Why don't I remember them?" She voiced the question in their heads. They nodded, and she answered it. "I can only remember brief, disjointed pieces. Everything on _this_ side of infinity is broken into small, fleeting moments, usually interactions. I can infer some information from them, but it's like trying to remember what happened on your fourth birthday. Plus, this brain is old and crusty." She gave a toothy smile as she prodded her temple. "Cut her some slack!"

"Well," Aya began. "The Spirit Crusade are a radical militia of traditionalists."

Teelo huffed. "That's a very delicate way of saying ' _bloodthirsty terrorists'_ "

Korra threw up a hand at Teelo. "I'm not a fan of sensationalist labels. for groups like these, killing is an unpleasant means. It is never the goal."

Teelo looked slightly shocked. His face scrunched in agitation. "Those people? That ' _radical militia?_ '" He made air quotes for emphasis. "They are _butchers,_ Avatar. They are a bigoted _thorn_ in the side of progress, and their tantrums have body-counts in the _thousands._ They will board this ship, take whatever supplies are useful, scuttle our reactor and leave us to our decaying orbit until Beifong swallows us whole."

" _Beifong!"_ Korra exclaimed, cutting into Teelo's rant with unwarranted enthusiasm. "That's the thing out there, right? What is that thing?"

Aya answered without thinking. She'd attempted to explain singularities to everyone in her family at least once. "It's a Black Hole. It's what happens when a star collapses in on itself."

Korra smiled. "That's a Beifong alright…"

Aya was still lost in thought. She sat on the floor, thumb planted on her chin, churning through the new data that was being thrust upon her. "How the _hell_ is there a version of this scenario in which we survive? I mean, _you,"_ She said, motioning to Korra. "You might survive. You'd be useful to their cause. but _us?_ I mean, we're dead, right? We _have to be._ "

Teelo squirmed. He hated Aya's annoying habit for making sense regardless of how unpleasant her conclusion was.

"On the contrary, I'm never making it off of this ship without the two of you in-tact. Seems to me we either all die right here, or we all make it out. Or some other third thing, who knows?" She gave a light-hearted shrug.

Aya and Teelo exchanged incredulous glances.

Korra stood up again, and her smile faded. "Teelo, they will have weapons of some kind. I need you to catch me up on how far we've come in terms of weaponry. What are we dealing with?"

Teelo was caught off guard. he felt his heart pound against his ribcage. _There would be fighting._ It was already etched into Korra's memory.

"weapons…" Teelo regained his nerve, and straightened his posture, "Right. They'll probably use spectral beam cages. they'll have spatial flares and fractal darts, too."

Korra looked at him blankly. "What are _any_ of those things?"

Aya leaned her head back against the wall. "They are all devices that you launch into a room to turn a lot of people into a lot of dead people, _instantly."_

Korra whistled. " _Great Laghima's ghost!"_ she said, staring vacantly.

Aya sighed. "Yeah, we've come quite a long way in three hundred years." she let out a long sigh. "Conflict has become _efficient."_

The Avatar smiled again. "In every struggle there is balance." She spun around. "Every move in the pro-bending arena has a counter-move. Whaaat do you got… _Teelo!"_ She pointed a finger at him, and he looked around as if it could have been meant for someone else. "These weapons, they run on some form of energy, _right?_ This future still consumes energy as electricity. That's fire-bending, that's _you."_

Aya was suddenly blindsided by a sudden giddiness at the mention of pro-bending. She had ALL of Korra's filmed matches on her holoscreen, and she had even started listening through the early audio-only matches.

"Well, security squad sparkies use an EMP technique to wipe out their weapons. But we're a science vessel. we have a security team of twenty people, and only four of them are firebenders…"

"So, can _you?_ " She repeated blankly.

"Oh, _me?_ I don't really do the whole 'violence' _thing._ I'm useless."

Korra closed her eyes and took a breath. "That doesn't answer my question, Teelo."

He swallowed. "Not _really._ I'm garbage at it, I'm a novice at best. It works when it wants to, which is almost _never._ If I missed one _single_ pulse none of us would even have enough time to regret the mistake."

She walked over to him, clasped him on the shoulders and gave him a wide grin. "You're going to be _perfect._ Give yourself some credit, kid."

He stared at her, dumbfounded.

She turned to Aya, then back to Teelo. "Alright then, we're gonna need some space-suits."


End file.
